


a replica of

by meatmarket



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 14:19:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15608145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meatmarket/pseuds/meatmarket
Summary: But Johnny catches on and perfects the synapse, meets Jaehyun halfway, and it’s no work at all.





	a replica of

**Author's Note:**

> if you know fuck-all abt inception, [cheat it](https://inception-in-detail.blogspot.com/2011/01/terminology.html), you coward   
>  **warnings** for v brief gun violence, a tiny bit of kinda gorey stuff, and mentions of needles
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> additionally, [sickened](https://66.media.tumblr.com/6b10d2e1817bc20a9d5116b27a4dc552/tumblr_inline_pj67exsxgf1s4sfpo_1280.jpg) courtesy of @[heartattack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartattack)

He’s seen it a million times. 

Johnny, dressed to the nines and wrinkleless like a shiny coin, at the far end of the bar counter. He’s got that salesman’s slant forward, that _I hear you_ , motor-mouthing with whoever he’s sat opposite.

All Jaehyun can see of Johnny’s company tonight is a sheet of black hair polished to a reflective thing. It ebbs into the cut of Lee Sunmi’s backless dress. That very much looks like an arrow. Or a target.

Jaehyun’s comfortable out of earshot. Nothing to learn that hadn’t made it into the early portfolio. Carved mouth, average height. She likes her coffee creamy. Doesn’t drink beyond the obligatory ceremonial lick for the camera.

Sunmi’s got a tsunamic pull in investigative press.   

Sunmi’s pale ankles are crossed.

Johnny is doing everything in his talent to take up as much of her oxygen as politely able.

“I promise you this one isn’t real,” Taeyong says. 

This chic glamor pit of a bar—Taeyong’s, too—is a squashed cube and looks what living things would look like with their satin insides out. It’s got a lot Jaehyun could fake-focus on while being real-jealous of the intricacy, down to the materials.

Think crisp glass art in a coffin of cherry wood, thickset as the bones of an aquarium and trapping down on its guests with its low bejeweled ceiling. Quite sweet on the nose, like rot. Probably a fresh brew. Jaehyun thinks to ask Taeyong about it later.

And thinking is exactly how this place came to be, bruised green lights and for some reason toasty as it is. The population of shiny waxed legs and Rolexed wrists herded in soon after the Big Bang.

Jaehyun knows that effectively makes everyone in here Taeyong’s fish.  

“Bad time to love hearing himself talk,” Jaehyun pockets his gray loaded die, annoyed he didn’t realize he’d reached for it. “Gonna tip her off, if it hasn’t already.”

“Least he’s enjoying himself.” 

“And she’s got training, you know this. We all know this. Next thing you know, he’ll have to backtrack. Last time he pulled this…” 

The backaches were a dick. 

You’d need a can opener for the slightest look beyond Taeyong’s composure, Jaehyun knows firsthand. Taeyong is a god at masking tension on the job, he’s out of everyone’s league like that.

He looks down at the something Jaehyun presumes is in his hands behind the counter. There’s the wet clink of a chock-full of ice.

Jaehyun likes Taeyong’s hands. They’ve got this magnetic calm about them that tugs at whatever’s in him that responds in kind.

“The bullets weren’t real, Jaehyunnie.” 

“Then next time, let’s switch.” 

“Be useful,” Taeyong says, “and tell me what it’s missing.” 

He forwards a saturated drink that shines a snail trail on the counter. The strobe lights from the ceiling bounce on it like a stroke of rainbow before Taeyong mops it up with a dishcloth and wedges a coaster underneath. Which is also what it tastes like when Jaehyun sips. 

Like a burst of pink and citrusy yellow, just coasting. 

Taeyong’s big bug eyes watch. “Too much ugly vodka, would you say?” 

Slurping some more, Jaehyun shakes his head. His fingers tickle, and he has to lick a few drops up before they roll under the creamy cuff of his shirt. 

“You like?” 

“What d’you call it?” 

“Me? I was thinking… your favorite liquid refreshment.” 

“How about, uh, Ego on the Beach.” 

“You like it.” 

“Hey, I’m allowed to. I’m allowed to do anything in here, technically.”

“Our Jaehyunnie is a rebel,” Taeyong says, pure sugar. “His balls so big you’ll trip over them, so careful when you’re walking downtown, watch your step.”

Jaehyun’s ears warm up. But he finishes the drink in one suck, licks a soft-edged ice cube into his mouth. He tongues it into the moppy inside of his cheek, suddenly aware of something like a hand on the back of his neck. 

“What happened to the music?” 

No one else seems to have noticed. 

Behind Taeyong, cut smack-dab in the middle of the rows on rows of liquor shelves and the mirror wall Jaehyun can see himself in, that’s a… makeshift door frame. 

Hingeless, it tapers into a greasy brown veil bitten off so as not to touch the floor, thick enough to pass for a pelt at a pretentious auction. Jaehyun recognizes it as the Holy Grail of what happens in the underbelly of Taeyong’s mind.    

The sneak-peek of your dreams. Jaehyun’s eyes flit to it. 

“What’s in there?” 

“Storage.” 

“And you didn’t have time to…?” Clean up? 

A silver earring is dripping down from Taeyong’s ear. It ends in a crystal cross that’s sweaty from the contact with his neck. It winks when he considers Jaehyun with that undiluted whole-body thing he aims at people that drowns them a little. 

It’s sticky, the sister of resin, and stays that way as he starts to whip up a martini for the pretty girl in gold leaned over the middle of the counter. 

“That I was sloppy,” Taeyong sticks a stabbed-through olive inside the glass’ flat mouth, “doesn’t mean you’d get through. You feel me?” 

He really doesn’t. Not in the way Taeyong’s probably trying to teach to him, and Jaehyun knows it’s not taking because he’s stubbornly being lukewarm about it. 

“Steady, Jae,” Taeyong says. Jaehyun relaxes his jaw. “Keep it tight.” 

“You wanna do something about the heating, baby?” pretty girl in gold asks. Her voice is high but somehow layered. “Because some of my places that shouldn’t slide are starting to.” 

As she takes her leave, in no wait for a human reaction from Taeyong, she looks point blank at Jaehyun. Slinks past him, a brush of body, hand ironing underneath the wing of his suit’s lapel like a secret set to expire. 

“If you’re ever bored.” She then sidesteps him and the situation both. Nibbles her olive.   

Jaehyun has an idea of what’s waiting before he reaches into his breast pocket, and it’s much better than haiku. Peering at the bad fold of paper, he smooths it out so the numbers get shape. A row of six of them, all there for him to memorize. 

But without a place to look, that’s only half of what they’ve come for.

Under the scrawl, an abstract doodle of what this light interprets as a big-balled— 

“Dick,” Jaehyun says under his breath. 

“If you ask nicely,” Taeyong says. 

Like Jaehyun’s personal self-fulfilling clockwork, the air gets inflexible. People all around turn their heads, hive in on the discrepancy in frequency. Spot the virus. 

They’re the virus. It’s the barest idea, the inkling of something wrong in Sunmi’s subconscious that’s put needles in her gut and extends to the projections, and Jaehyun knows he feels a dozen eyeballs on him only because he and Taeyong are within Johnny’s close radius. 

Because Johnny is the real rash here. Amused at knowing that feeling, Jaehyun vehemently orders another drink. 

“…very well,” Johnny swerves with a privy smile. 

Surprise, idiot. 

“I have to admit,” Johnny has to admit, “I haven’t been completely honest with you. The plain truth of the matter is, Miss Lee, I am not a businessman, nor do I like anything on the rocks.” 

Just as Johnny bravely leans back into the tininess of his chair, Jaehyun starts mouthing. My name is Mr. Charles— 

“My name is Mr. Charles,” says Johnny, “and I’m here to ensure your safety.” 

There are ants collecting in Jaehyun’s fingertips. 

Johnny proceeds to explain to her how he’s a projection. A layer of mind security, a white blood cell of your subconscious in response to being hijacked, miss Lee. I am not real. In fact, nobody in this room but you is. 

And that there are people after her, those who have put her under here, in the state of dreaming. 

They’re not in this very room, but perhaps behind a door. Behind that door’s door is another door and another room and maybe an altogether different location, a pocket deep in her brain she doesn’t even know she has where she houses private data. 

If you have something to hide, they’ll want it. 

That late-night ugly buzz. Whatever she’s ashamed of. Or maybe numbers. 

“You of all people know how sticky fingers are when it comes to things that aren’t theirs,” Johnny continues. “You remember this, don’t you? This is part of your defense training.” 

You’re dreaming, Miss Lee, and you’re being robbed as we speak. To find the source, you need to trust me. 

Trust me. 

Trust him, Jaehyun thinks. 

Jaehyun is part of it when the room releases a collective breath, a stomachful of people being de-corseted. They’re no different than music box figurines, these people, as they turn away and pick up the fragments of their sentences right where they were left off. 

Sunmi swivels on the barstool fluidly enough that Jaehyun’s periphery catches Johnny’s look-back. Johnny seems slicked back. In check. 

“Excuse me?” 

“Yes?” Taeyong perks. 

“May I have a mimosa, please,” Sunmi’s nails are red dots on the counter. “Thank you.” 

That tiny stone she’s thrown is all it takes to ripple Johnny’s surface. Johnny doesn’t seem slicked back, or in check. 

Johnny seems like he’s about to be a prime goddamn dickhead. 

Thank you. 

Not even a blink in, and the suppressor of Johnny’s beretta buries into Sunmi’s hair, Jaehyun not lagging a bit. 

His own glock is warm like skin from digging into his back for hours, he almost forgot it was there, it’d been that friendly. 

Johnny is whispering to her. Sunmi looks like a still out of a movie, perfectly unmoving if not for her panicked breathing. She’s looking to the side like Johnny might fit into the angle. He doesn’t. 

Taeyong nods when Jaehyun looks at him. Safety off, then. Aim right. Taeyong’s mouth and Taeyong’s chin, Taeyong’s relaxed hands, and Jaehyun shoots him in the head. 

Taeyong has to go first, he’s the bones of the plan they inevitably fall back on in emergency, and this is emergency. This is how buying time works. 

If under all this there was an additional layer of dream, the split second it takes for a bullet to brain someone would stretch into an observable thing here, frame by frame by frame. An evolutionary chart. No apes, though. 

Click. The bullet tip touching to the forehead. Click. The bullet drilling past the skin like it’s aspic, then bone. Click. A splash of brain matter. 

Click, a peephole the girth of Jaehyun’s ring finger. 

Jaehyun’s never gonna get used to the bloodspray, to Taeyong’s head snapping backwards when the soul is no longer there. Toppling the rest of him. The fall rethinks itself and leads with his nose, which drops Taeyong’s body over the counter with a sack-of-bones thump. 

The back of Taeyong’s head looks like cherry pie.   

The projections tide, a swarm of tens of insect heads and insect bodies on a joyride to the fresh steamy shit that are the two armed idiots left. 

Jaehyun makes it a carnival crossbow shoot, and pows projections in succession so smooth he might win a plushie at the icky end of this, when Johnny’s done taking his sweet time talking. 

A bushy-browed fella cuts it behind the bar as far as Taeyong’s body, and Jaehyun sacrifices a bowl of makgeolli before that scrambling monkey gets it in the neck. It’s a thick stream, and it gushes out his mouth.

That’s when Jaehyun sees. 

A slim clawtooth glint between Sunmi’s risen knuckles, something to coax letters open with. Jaehyun thinks he makes a sound. 

That’s when she goes buckwild and opens Johnny’s throat up.

 

 

Jaehyun wakes up with blood in his mouth, neck all origami. 

He flinches away from an angry diamond flare. Click, and it disappears into a medical pen light. Jaehyun blinks. 

Hands rubbing under his jaw.    

Taeyong’s sweaty face looking down at him. Taeyong’s mouth moving. Jaehyun looks around at the rest of his people, both in respective stages of uncrumple. 

“…disgusting,” Ten is saying as sound comes back. 

“Did I tell you to eat it?”

“ _Did I tell you to eat it_. I was dying, genius.” 

Scrambling up against the tall bathroom paneling, Jaehyun is caught in his own racing body. 

Near the white marble sinks polished to bald heads, he sees Ten pluck a spindly needle out of his forearm, and finds his own taken care of already. Just sweet pink, no bruise. 

Taeyong is the first to move with a broader purpose. He snakes past Jaehyun, unzips his bulletproof vest of a sweatshirt. Peels it away from the staff uniform he’s wearing underneath like he’s pulling back a tree’s growth rings. He licks over his upper lip. The chewed-up beanie on his head is the last to go into the trash can. 

The bathroom’s vaultike light dangles over Lee Sunmi’s body that’s lying in the middle of the floor, where Taeyong kneels. They both look softened to hash browns and beiges in the light.

Sunmi is still under, a lovely mummy of gala shimmer. She’s hooked to a heavy silver contraption by a tinted skinny tube. Seeing that relieves some of the pressure from Jaehyun’s temples. 

In the bland center of the opposing wall, next to the farthest half-lidded stall door of the row of stall doors, on that wall hangs a long mirror. In front of it, Johnny, learning to stand up again, a little newborn about it. 

None of that matters because before he does, Jaehyun’s across the bathroom and hammering him into the wall. 

It’s a heavy haul because nothing about Johnny is small, but put a little effort in, and anything budges. 

Johnny’s shoulder pokes into the mirror frame. Johnny’s golden earring sways in aftershocks. 

There’s something glitzy about watching him figure it out, watching him catch up to the forearm Jaehyun’s got bolted across his chest and just how much he means it. 

He holds position should Johnny get the slick fish struggle, but no such thing. No such thing, and Jaehyun kind of resents that it’s that clean. 

At this sardined range, where Johnny’s face overwhelms, there’s no leaning back, but he makes it look like he’s doing just that. Just so. Things that irritate Jaehyun: not that, but close. Not the exhale that smells like a mouth that was closed too long, but quite close enough. 

“Really?” That’s Ten.

Ten back-hugs him better than a carapace, puts his weight into how he jimmies at Jaehyun’s elbow, a stiff monkey on his back. 

“Do it for the fucking children, Jae, now is not the time.” 

Personally, Jaehyun feels he’s getting a point across. 

With the back of his fingers he smacks a sound out of Johnny’s cheek. Time to wake up. 

Johnny’s a little creased up when he lets go. The human sounds of an event start sloshing in, and Jaehyun exits Ten’s softened spaghetti arms. 

Jaehyun goes to his knees at Taeyong’s side and immediately goes about compacting the PASIV. It folds into a briefcase when done properly, and he only unplugs Sunmi from its sedative once Taeyong’s had his fun with disinfectant and a syringe loaded. 

“How much is that gonna—” Jaehyun looks at the syringe and takes the now-empty vial from Taeyong’s hand. 

“Seven minutes more,” Taeyong’s nail flicks the waist of the plastic, and its milky insides tremble. 

He pushes the plunger to oust the residual air bubbles until it tears up and it’s safe. 

The flimsy baking paper skin on the inside of Sunmi’s elbow sticks to the needle when Taeyong pulls it back out, like it’s being sucked into the tiny tip. 

So seven minutes it is. 

They have seven minutes to vacuum back the way they came from. That much until Sunmi’s sleeping beauty curse lifts and she jerks herself conscious in the ladies’ room, trying to remember why in the world she didn’t opt for the above floor’s one despite the _SLIPPERY WHEN WET_ sign Doyoung had put at the door. 

The smell of isopropyl alcohol colonizes Jaehyun’s nose. That and something that tries hard to be vanilla, which he knows is just leftovers from Johnny. 

Or someone else finds her. That someone will assume she’s come here to shed a calorie or two, not bat an eye. But two days later, a new round of gossip will have been stimulated in the press circles. 

Johnny lifts the briefcase by the ear, knees working at Jaehyun’s eye level as he bends. He exits first. 

 

 

Funniest thing about taking the subway with a glock on your person, when the train jiggles while it’s stale and damp and crowded like a submarine. Jaehyun keeps his glock at his hip.

Because of that, when the train jiggles, whoever stumbles wrong experiences the hard-on in Jaehyun’s jeans. Rubs on it this inadvertent way or that.

The look after isn’t that funny out of context, but the noodle-bodied dude who looks made of flour doesn’t know squat about Jaehyun inside of it. So Jaehyun just looks. Smiles in the dude’s face. Counts his zits, then meets Ten and his flapping trench coat above ground.

One more thing that’s flapping is the gaggle of plastic bags noosed around Ten’s wrist. They’re violent static in Jaehyun’s ear when Ten fits an arm around his shoulders, sniffs at his neck.

Crouching just under Seoul’s nose, along the thickest artery of its infrastructure, is a lego apartment complex, carbon-copy concrete in a way that kills you if you’re into long looks, or just have eyes.

Jaehyun’s got a flipped feeling about this one. Everything he’s fond of it’s got inside.

The lowest floor is theirs, and two square windows on the right glow along the rim like bloodshot eyes. Someone’s in the darkroom.

Looking at it as it all gentles into the mist, the light and the swollen plastic window frames, Ten says he’s in the mood for some bulgogi.

Jaehyun laughs.

 

 

The darkroom smells like old skin and vinegar, something leather, something armpit. It’s this uninviting clotting wound, pulsing red light and stuffy.

Johnny’s got a severe case of camel back over the equipment. He’s wearing a tank-top, hair dry and looking synthetic.

There’s so little left in here to breathe, it hurts Jaehyun to shut the door.

“This is something,” Jaehyun says, watching an arm.

The non-light flatters it, wrings it into a slick blood sausage stuffed with three footballs bulging through. Who even goes around cutting sleeves off regular t-shirts?

“This guy,” Johnny murmurs.

Then he squiggles something on a photo, then warps around and attaches it with a tiny wooden pin to the room-diagonal clothesline of undried snapshots. Jaehyun ducks and watches the gloss.

Some of them seem Johnny’s, but most are aggressively Doyoung’s. Jaehyun wonders just when it happened that Doyoung’d started letting Johnny step on this particular homework’s toes, if it could be out of pity. If not.

“Box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes,” Jaehyun says. At Johnny’s nothing, he adds, “Fun fact.”

Three milky trays line the working counter at the wall, half-empty with clear liquid and sloshing in the forced intimacy of the room whenever Johnny bathes each individual shot. Plop, plop.

He pincers the photo around in the middle tray, and Jaehyun watches as it fades in, like age in reverse.

Just a whisper of something caught, a memory, at first. Then a semblance of meaning, shapes, and, eventually, a whole high-cheeked human head. The scene looks about two Jaehyuns old and ripped out of a magazine spread, but it was taken last Sunday.

Plop, plop.

How Johnny’s not losing it little by little in this slow, slow business of humdrum patience, Jaehyun to this day hasn’t dissected.

“Y’know you don’t have to keep doing this,” Jaehyun says, bleached of any inflection.

“I know,” says Johnny for the hundredth time. “I like the real thing, and that’s not dry yet.”

Jaehyun unsticks his finger from the tacky grab of the photo apparently not for sale at Johnny’s elbow, leaving a fingerprint over Kim Hyuna’s face.

“Less gets lost in translation,” he soldiers on. “The pixels are clearer.”

“All part of development in life.” A drop of sweat glitters down Johnny’s flat nose. Hangs at the tip, deciding. Flicks into the developer bath.

“You can’t zoom in on film.”

“And digi doesn’t stink,” Johnny mocks on before Jaehyun can.

“That’s right.” Wait. “The personality of it isn’t worth the hassle. It’s outdated.”

“Don’t be jealous,” Johnny’s focus is unbothered but precise. Plenty of times Jaehyun’s seen him do this unthinking.

“There’s more important things to waste time on.”

Wouldn’t Jaehyun know. And Johnny should know as much, should say it like Jaehyun wants it said, but instead:

“Doyoung…”

“The one born with a brain, among the lot of us,” Jaehyun runs in front of that train of thought, not keen on the original destination. In this pizza box of a room, no less. “That’s what he’s maintained.” 

“Sure. Dream big,” Johnny encourages. 

Plop, plop.

 

* * *

 

Like a shit from the skies, a fat yellow file splats onto the table, spilling pages. This time, Doyoung is the mailman.

“That’s fast,” Johnny murmurs.

“That’s business for you. Asshole must’ve been on the edge of his seat. Absolutely beside himself. Go on.”

Already Jaehyun’s bored.

“Mark Lee…” Johnny reads.

“Canadian,” Jaehyun cuts in. The red sauce steam from his cup ramen sweats his eyes as he stirs. “Architecture dropout, grew up in daddy’s pocket, deep one, could probably recreate his ass imprint from memory. But don’t quote me.” 

“Nakamoto sent this as a pointer,” Doyoung says slowly, “for what we’re lacking.” Then, eyeballing Johnny or Jaehyun at this mysterious angle, “To finish the job.” 

Johnny’s sniff is dry. “If only you’d been there.”

“If I had, it’d be finished.” 

“Oh, the job?” 

“Nakamoto sent this to flex,” Jaehyun says, watching Johnny watch Doyoung turn into better light. 

“But he did it now? He could’ve just…” 

“Hey, Doyoung,” Ten pipes up, ripping a packet open, “feed me.” 

“Well, obviously time is not the currency,” says Taeyong. “Whether it’s done in a week or a month, for all he cares. Things can stretch out.” 

“Bet it’s more fun for him that way,” Jaehyun can’t tell melting tongue from dough in his mouth. 

“I’d rather it wasn’t,” Doyoung says and scoops meat into Ten’s mouth. Ten, he jams his fork into Jaehyun’s blistering plastic cup on blind luck. 

“Do we bring up handing off what we’ve got?” 

“Wouldn’t work,” Johnny dismisses. 

“As leverage,” Ten presses.

“Wouldn’t. Work.”

“No,” Taeyong swallows with too little chewing. “We continue with the rest of the—” He flaps his wrist.

“And chicken-looking kid’ll help us along,” Ten translates.

“Yeah, he’s just the keychain.”

“That how you treat all your interns?”

“Nakamoto sent this—” Jaehyun begins, androidlike, but has to gulp around to see if he’ll cry from chili overstimulation, “—to flex. God, this is hot.”  

“Well, then that’s expanding our zoo,” Ten announces. “Means we’ll need an animator.”

“I vote drawing straws,” Jaehyun says.

“I vote going by whose suffering would please the court the most,” says Ten, licking his fork clean.

Above all this, Taeyong swan-extends his neck. “Great. Who’s got the apple sauce?”

Nobody questions how that goes with fish stew.

 

* * *

 

Jaehyun chokes off the cold downpour until it pitter-patters away into nothing above his head. He’s slippery goosebumps all over, untangling the seaweed mop of hair from his eyes.

He raspberries water out of his mouth that’s half-saliva, and some clings to his chin before it slimes down. He pokes out more with his tongue, watching it hit the dark tiles.

He kind of just stands there, blinking away conditioned tears because he should’ve rinsed better.

A shuffle echoes.

Someone hops into the shower stall on the other side. Tubey sounds of toiletries. Something smacks down. Someone mutters. Cap opening, then shower sprinkle.

That sudden off-key hum doesn’t flatter the atmospheric light. He recognizes it as Johnny’s.

In camera-handling today, Doyoung sucked out some pretty needles out of the high stack of bills that was the event. Including the quartet of them disappearing from various points in the footage like the perfect editor’s touch.

Not far off from what Doyoung would settle for, actually, as Jaehyun came to know about certain movie rats.

Jaehyun has to tune in by will to realize the self-slicking sounds on the other side, like plums opening or tacky chewing, aren’t just that. They’re Johnny beating it well and plump.

The waterfall white noise thins out some, likely to preserve the froth, is Jaehyun’s first go-to, but then, Johnny’s gotta be more evolved than that. Even above wash-off lotion.

Jaehyun thinks like good boys with brains do. He thinks hard of the Herculean sock pile fattening in the rotting hallway hamper. Last time he tried to sugartalk Taeyong into covering his laundry shift, it was Jaehyun’s ear that got talked off.

And Johnny, well, he starts with these messy grunts. They’re full of air and throat, and it’s more funny than exciting, but they’re big like his body, in a way. Same deal as with his meaty dick, right.

It’s only fair that those match.

Jaehyun’s not a blusher, not by traditional means. He’s a nifty symptom-masker, like growing his hair just a pinch longer on the sides, but this rearranges his temperature a little too well. His skin and his muscle stick and wall him inside like hot metal.

But inside is where he now has the memory of pinning Johnny to fuck into. He’s had it, but took surgical care not to really.

Licking at his lip, Jaehyun finds there’s a lot more to swallow. He looks down at his interested dick for an explanation.

He tugs at it.

The tilejob tricks Johnny’s heavying breaths into something peripheral. Closer, like Jaehyun’s straightening spine, like the stiff pinprick in his neck, and wouldn’t that be something.

Slow, Jaehyun inches his legs apart, like it’s for show. Pushing at his thigh as he palms back up, he rocks into it just to see.

He thinks much better of it when Johnny cuts off the water, going acoustic.

 

* * *

 

“Can you tell me how movies begin?” 

Slowing down until there’s unnatural stillness, Mark looks at him like he’s wondering if he’s being fucked with. 

Absurd, right? 

“Uh, well, uh, there’s the, there’s the opening credits—” His face betrays him. 

“Not quite where I’m going with this,” it twitches Jaehyun’s mouth because that’s the same cut-and-dry approach he’d once taken. Only it took him and took him to shed it and come around.     

Craning every which way like a magpie, Mark says that nothing has changed around here. Well, since he’d spent time here as an exchange student. He’d get his lunch just around the corner. Cool. Still remembers enough German to get by, probably.

“Okay,” Jaehyun snaps his fingers, “recall a movie, any movie you remember watching. Got one? Good, I don’t wanna know. Now jump to the second scene. And then to the third scene and fourth and so on. What do they all have in common?”

“You don’t really…” Mark’s eyebrows slice little brackets into his forehead. “I mean, you can’t be sure when exactly they begin, right?”

“Very good,” Jaehyun says. He’s ready for Mark to break into a talk about acid trips even before he prods, “And what about lucid dreaming, ever heard of it?”

“You’re aware I went to school, yeah?”

Mark strains a tree groan out of his rattan chair as he sinks farther into it. Away from Jaehyun.

“So, uh, yeah, anyway, lucid dreaming, basically just means you’re aware. You’re doing that, all that dream stuff you do when you sleep, while also being conscious enough to…”

“Control.”

“Yeah, I was gonna say, control the dream itself.”

“Can you recall ever doing that?”

“What, sleeping? Not since middle school, no.”

Jaehyun’s mouth curls.

“I see. How about being independent. Ever done that, to your knowledge?”

At times, Mark’s face is almost a caricature, that open to reading, that too good to be true.

Jaehyun’s right at snug home in this silence. He engages in brief eye contact with a dog with a toilet brush for a tail at the neighboring table. The dog belongs to a guy who barely folds into the micro-seat.

Contrary as that’d be as a rule, it looks to Jaehyun that being knocked down a peg, the longer it sits, unwinds Mark’s suspicion infinitely more easily than any ass-kissing ever could.

That’s good news. If not to Mark’s parents’ credit, then to Jaehyun. He doesn’t like the difficults.

Mark gives it a tentative, “Guess. But the— what did you call it? Control? The control I had over the dream wasn’t… good. Like, I realized what was happening, and I wanted to fly. So then I was flying, but it wasn’t a stable trajectory.”

“You fell down on your ass?”

“Dude, it hurt like hell.”

“Right. You can still feel pain in a dream. And pleasure.”

“It felt like I was falling forever and then some.”

“But it only lasted a fraction of a second in reality,” Jaehyun sips his almond venti, very approving. “Then you could say that’s what dreams are, actually. Just short movies.”

“Honestly, this job interview is so weird.” 

“You don’t like Vienna?” 

“No, I like Vienna fine,” Mark reaches for the napkin, legs splaying under the table. “What I don’t like is that we’re not even awake and Vienna is where you take me to sniff car fumes.” 

Jaehyun turns his open mouth into a smile.

They take it to the streets of Milan at night.

Mark’s dream-savvy enough to recognize his father’s conglomerate brain having been subject to multiple theft attempts as not that white of a flag. Mark has been told but he hasn’t been schooled.

Jaehyun wonders if that’s not fishy to Mark, his dad being almost-robbed this way, and now Mark, here. Like father like blah, blah. If it doesn’t seem off one bit.

But nah, Mark says, that he and his dad take turns playing dead with each other more than they really talk.

“Wouldn’t be much of a tie-in,” Mark says. “But you knew that, I feel like. What else do you know?”

Taking turns playing dead, he implies, it has its pros and cons that way.

Pros, there’s no use using him that way, so he’s here because of his raw potential or whatever and what he could contribute to the team—

“There’s a team, right?” Mark catches himself realizing. 

“There’s always a team,” Jaehyun says. 

The list of cons spans longer but isn’t of any immediate interest to Jaehyun. 

“You can play,” Jaehyun says to Mark’s white knuckles. 

Mark, who looks a swallow away from slobbering all over this world that’s by all accounts still ordinary. 

“You need experience to get hired, so go as nuts as you want, but remember. I can’t control my subconscious if you make yourself too obvious.” 

And does Mark want. 

He doesn’t stop walking, just looks up from underneath his lashes, a voyeur of his own land. He bends the sky into an impressionistic painting, something orange and spongy that Jaehyun knows. Wooden frame and all. 

It fries down on the tops of their heads because Mark reasons more than one sun must be behind such a strong color, like that’s enough of a band-aid for upsetting basic physics. So there’s three suns hung in the sky, now, like a multiplied tumor or yolks, making Mark’s eyes wet as he keeps admiring them directly. 

Any more, and skin might start peeling off.

Jaehyun tuts, and Mark blinks sun spots away from his vision, nose scrunching at the bridge. 

Mark focuses, and the sky fast-forwards into a footage version of itself, back to cartoonish blue and gray and tufty mayonnaise clouds. 

“I don’t really know it here, I’ve just seen pictures, so.” 

“Human thoughts are repetitive,” Jaehyun says when he spots there’s a street twice. “You don’t like that. Good, ‘cause you wanna avoid that. The mark—also subject—they notice these things, more often than not. Especially if they’re agitated.” 

Mark side-eyes the denser influx of passers-by. “But you’re not anxious, though?”

“But I’ve noticed.” 

Mark says that yeah, but he’s cheating.

Jaehyun fingers the bowels of his windbreaker pocket for his gray loaded die. It’s matte, two white vampire fangs dotted into the side he’s presenting to Mark. Its remaining five faces are smooth and numberless. 

It’s very light between his fingers, but normally, it weighs something.

“Look here. You see this? You’ve heard of totems. In the dream world of the owner—that’s me—their totem feels right.”

“Like a brand, I know.” Mark nods to the die. “What’s it stand for?”

Straight out of animation, won signs for pupils and face oblong because the mouth keeps a carpet that rolls out for events, Mark paws for the die. He only gets as far as the back of Jaehyun’s hand.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Why not?”

“That’s my anchor to reality,” Jaehyun says, “you dildo. You leave people’s totems be and make them do the same for you.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“You practically grope people’s minds, like, all the time.”

“That’s a different kind of taking.”

“It is?”

“Messing with someone’s reality like that, you’re less of a person at the end of it, so you’d prefer not to.”

Mark, jaw down, looks like he’s paying attention for the first time in his life. Whether at Jaehyun suggesting this mucky bizz still has a pulse of moral code or the fact that Jaehyun is the one carrying its torch, jury’s out. 

Cross-cutting it over dying grass, they make it through a cemetery. Through tightly-packed memorials that accommodate as they pass. 

Mark observes away, impatient. The palms of his hands drum against his thighs to some internal rhythm known only to him. 

“So, how do I get one?” 

And Jaehyun’s one cheek pulls back, “Didn’t you go to school?” 

They’re about to round a half-brass drinking fountain at the hip of El Duomo when, what do you know. The pipe overpressures and chokes up, spurts like come. Next Jaehyun takes a breath, his face is dripping fresh. 

“Oh, man. Squirtle, is that you, man?” Mark asks, his little body bottling up the shakes. Little shit’s got the giggle shivers. “Is it? I’ve, I’ve been lookin’ all over for—” 

Someone, a projection, knocks into Mark hard as they pass. To Jaehyun’s karmic delight, Mark stumbles, this close to rawing gravel into his bare knees. He goes through the trouble to pivot just to shoot a stink-eye. 

“Dude—”

“Out of my hands,” Jaehyun reminds, dogging him. “Told you. You better patch up the wound quick. You don’t wanna get eaten this way.”

It’s not like anything’s bleeding yet, but soon. If Mark keeps up his self, then soon. 

Undoing the wetness altogether wouldn’t be bad, but this is Mark’s debut, and Jaehyun wants him to feel he’s the one working the joystick, no loopholes. He spits to get rid of the public pipe germ aftertaste. 

Jaehyun commends the attention to degustatory detail, says as much out loud. Shepherds Mark into funneling them seamlessly into a wet Seoul, which Jaehyun only okays once Mark insists on it instead of a moonlit Vancouver pier tonguing out into the snapping sea breeze.

The streets of Itaewon cobble and hurry over each other, undulate and stitch themselves into a carpet piece of a place. Mark’s little mouth is barely closed as he jumps over a bench that hadn’t been there before he scrunched his knee. 

Jaehyun only catches this because he could do it in his sleep. 

The building blocks of the brain that look like shiny scales project matter steeper and bulkier and more building-like.

They overgrow their architectonic ambition until Mark’s playing jazz hands whack-a-mole with a cyberpunk jungle of stubs and retiring jumbo skyscrapers and all the in-betweens. Mark rams them down like teeth of sand if he doesn’t like this or that, occasionally wondering of Jaehyun’s input.

On that occasion, Jaehyun will say, “You got that upside down.”

Or, “Not bad, actually.” 

Or, “That’s too erect.”   

Which is a case of in one ear and out the other with Mark and his edgy newspaper hoodie, but still. Mark is good. Could’ve gotten that degree twice over with one fist up his ass, probably.

“When did you get bored?” Jaehyun asks, mulling that one over. “Of school, I mean.”

“I’ve always been bored, dude. Well,” Mark studies his work, “for the most part.” 

On the left, the National Theater goes down in a pile of swathing cigarette ash that doesn’t clear up for a couple of coughs.

Next to a chipped red fire hydrant, a dog with a ratty tail barks at Mark. That same guy who doesn’t fit in chairs approaches from the sprawling end of the street, the only other projection here Jaehyun pays attention to. 

Resting douche face and asshole eyes, bank savings strapped around his left wrist. Jaehyun tries to tell the time from it when it’s close enough, but he forgets numbers just then. 

“Jaehyun?” 

Mark’s alarm is secondary, but the fact is Mark is alarmed. Jaehyun knows why that is by the dream’s dripping seams.

Dying is bad enough as is when you know, but it’s worse as an unidentified looming. Like Mark’s breathing beating out of him.

“Jae—”

Dread nails Jaehyun in place where it wants him, and when the tidal wave crests, it flushes them down in a giant toilet.

 

 

Mark is twitching like a fish when Jaehyun catches up and comes to. The lawn chair Mark’s sprawled on belly-down groans. Puffing in and out with his breath is a stutter of shitshitshit…

Squinting hard, Mark lifts his left hand out of a see-through bowl of water. He stares at the drip. Wipes it backwards on his asscheek. Then he paws back down for the bowl on the ground and downs the water in two gos at that neck-breaking angle. 

There’s a relief Jaehyun wants. The die is where it always is, which is on his person. He knows he doesn’t need it and knows its grammage in the current climate, but doesn’t like that he safety-nets thinking of it first thing. 

Jaehyun thumbs the ligamented inside of his wrist, feels the strings. It’s like they could part if he dug better. Higher than that is the needle, showing through like an underskin maggot after an exceptional growth spurt, which he extracts in a quick pull. 

He develops back to bipedalism, complete with the loitering people do after the mundane sorts of wakings, and almost reacts when— 

—Ten wants to know, “What’s up with the bulldog persona thing?” 

Slinky little bitch.

Mark’s panic stalls. Sits him up. He hesitates like he’s searching for the benefit of the doubt. “The…?”

“Bulldog thing. You lose your neck when you’re all into it. Or defensive. It’s your shoulders, see. You hunch horribly.”

“Mark, this is Ten. Keeps saying he’s the forger around here.”

“Nice to meet you, I’m Mark?”

“It’s like someone took your acorn away,” Ten dribbles on, taking the bowl from Mark’s hands. “It’s like, what do you have to be perpetually angry about? One may wonder.” 

Mark looks to Jaehyun, at a loss. 

“He’s stable,” Jaehyun says to one of them. 

“Just watch out for it, squirrel. Also, stop talking to yourself,” Ten pops a mint into his mouth, his wrists netted in delicate gold. “It’s weird.” 

“I don’t talk to myself!” 

“The mind flocks to weird,” Jaehyun elaborates, “but we don’t want that when we’re under. We don’t want the attention.”

“Because we could die,” Ten imparts. 

“Okay? But how would he—” 

“It’s Ten.” 

“How would you know?” 

“Oh. Taeyong-hyung was right,” Ten laments. “Still a baby. That’s cute… until it’s not.” 

Mark sighs. “Who?” 

“If you could hold still, please,” Taeyong startles several Jesuses out of Mark as he clamps close for a physical check-up, fisting through his hair. “Hold— And now look here. Try not to blink so much. Okay, please breathe, though.”

Jaehyun leaves them to absorb Mark in. It’s a whole intracellular thing.

 

 

He finds Johnny because he’s looking for him. The cabinet’s open door invites him and inside, Johnny and Doyoung do, too, nodding him in. They’re discussing something. 

Somewhere along the ride, Johnny’s personal corner took an unconscious Gothic nosedive that he surrendered to, patterned and wooden. Old-book dust that tickles like a would-be sneeze everywhere, but Jaehyun knows it’s clean here.

Jaehyun poaches Doyoung’s half-done bottle of soju and takes it to the sofa. Bad, bad imitation of broken leather. One of its bare springs nails into his thigh the more laze he puts into it. Not even that helps him blink himself present. 

In the orbit buzzes a fat mosquito, its pot-bellied punchdrunk body teetering upon touchdown on Jaehyun’s forearm. Its face is a hilarious big-nosed thing, even though that funnel is its mouth. 

There, little bug. Little disproportional fuckwit.

Much like the seasonal debugging their living spaces have to routinely go through. 

Jaehyun watches it pump his blood. 

As he’s bidding adieu, Doyoung says that he’s secured the passports should this deal tap dance too close to a governmental shitshow. 

Doyoung, ever graceful like that. Shitshow this, shitshow that.

Only when Johnny puffs through his nose it dawns on Jaehyun how long it’s been since sound. “I used to think that guy hated me.”

“Still does, you’re not special.”

“Neither are you,” Johnny says, “same thing. Like, when I used to think you…”

Jaehyun’s soju stops halfway to his mouth.

“What?”

“You’ve got this, I dunno—”

“You’re serious.”

That same bloodsucker, sucker of blood, circles back for more, and Jaehyun’d be a flattered donor if not for the spreading itch. The mosquito floats close, calculating…

…and splats under his palm like a juicy booger.

Johnny laughs from somewhere deep and young, staring down the throat of his embarrassingly low-percentage soju. “I don’t know how to explain it. You didn’t really seem the type to be interested in people. Ironic, you know? Considering.”

“Taeyong says I can be a lot of effort,” Jaehyun remembers, almost back to sipping, but then Johnny circumvents his glazy desk and parks it into the loveseat next to Jaehyun.

“A handful,” he agrees.

Jaehyun’s been noticing these offhand tics he’s started adopting from Taeyong. Like sticking his feet in Johnny’s lap, or coercively wiggling them when Johnny doesn’t reach to knead them first.

But then, it’s not quite like they’d never been there, either.

Forest and trees?

He pillows his head along the armrest and taps the wet lip of the bottle to his mouth, licking inside it. He can’t say Johnny looks bored.

“Tells me that he won’t always be there to emotionally lubricate me, something about dense coconut heads.”

Johnny makes a funny face. Jaehyun doesn’t much mind any of them.

“Any idea what any of that means, Johnnyboy?”

Johnny surrenders his hands palm-up.

“Not even one?”

“Taeyongspeak for something wise, I’m sure.”

Jaehyun gets buzzed to the feeling of having his calves played with.

 

* * *

 

“Why do you guys need me?” Mark asks one drowsy afternoon, chewing on crab cake. “No complaints, like, at all. Just, yeah?” 

Jaehyun and Johnny exchange a look that solidifies into an unsettling, gut-tugging thing when Johnny, sad as it is, opens his mouth. 

“Taeyong’s breaking down, and they don’t make his parts anymore.” 

“Herding in the young blood,” Ten says, face 80% mirrored sunnies and one-fifth nose.

“I’m three years younger than you.” 

“There you go.” 

“Applied economics,” Johnny’s forearms make complementary horizontal T-lines to his shins as he settles them on the knees. “Everyone’s only relevant once, a task per person kinda deal. Hasn’t your doc ever told you not to overuse a joint? No? It’s just me who’s old, then.”

“Okay, well, what if someone gets… When someone falls out, what happens next?” 

“Taeyong takes their spot.” 

Mark’s _that’s… kind of ironic_ face is state-of-the-art to Jaehyun, especially at a distance. 

“Doesn’t like to get bored,” Johnny says with a straight mug. 

“And because he’s a machine, right,” Mark says. “What if he’s the one injured?” 

Jaehyun’s face twitches, “Then we’re in bottomless feces.” 

“Exaggerate for yourself.” Ten is sizing up the plastic camp of half-dead garden chairs. He pores over which one to sit on. “I myself am pretty decent with a tube and, ah, whatever-else-assorted have you there.”  

“If you’re looking to be put in a coma,” Jaehyun turns, “Ten here’s your guy. Contact his publicist.” 

“Seriously? You killed someone, like the real thing?” 

And that’s as hilarious as it is sobering, but Jaehyun just tucks it in the bend of his half-smile. Crouches low, unpacks the heavy dream machine piece by piece like it’s organs, one lung at a time. 

“Oh, it was pretty serious,” tosses a waltzing-in Taeyong. His armfuls make a basket of vials and needles and sheer tubes umbilically coiled down from around his neck like baby snakes. “Almost cost us the entire op, isn’t that right? Johnny, will you please.”

“Focusing on the task at hand,” Ten interjects. 

“How many Tens does it take to switch off a subconscious?” wonders Johnny.

As Ten flips him off with a bendy finger, Johnny’s up and grinning, and Jaehyun’s got to bite his own mouth back to tact.

Taeyong coos at them all like a pigeon. Says how they’re such big boys and not mentally shriveled at all, and they’d better zip it.

 

 

Taeyong’s station is Jaehyun’s least favorite because that one he’d actually miss, how half-shrub and half-anesthetic it is, no shits given about how frequent Jaehyun’s pop-ups. 

It almost feels like his, whenever there’s minus one Taeyong on the turf. It’s marine life mosaicked with steel and glass.

A trio of instrument tables, with their little wheels fastened, form a seamless joint at the front. That’s the reception desk for the secluded behind the scenes.

Behind it is a wall of trellis shawled over with droopy climbing hydrangea, pea-sized buds of embryo flowers bubbling up like blisters. Taeyong’s smarts about room dividers make this its own world.   

First reception desk to ever have two shiny handguns chilling among pots of cacti, probably. To refresh them, Jaehyun picks up a spray bottle of saline water. The guns, not the cacti. Grabbing one, he snags the handkerchief sheeted over a bed of books and starts to polish up the grip of the gun only. 

The spray makes snorting sounds. 

“That’s poisonous,” Taeyong deadpans once he washes ashore. 

“Is that what you told Mark? He try to lick this or something?” 

“The funny thing about Mark…” 

Which one? 

“The funny thing about Mark is, he does most of that talking on his own.”

Taeyong’s wearing a tie the way normal folk do headbands, but it reminds Jaehyun of a tourniquet more. Same color as rubber, same flappy bit, too.

“Colors in the drawing, and you don’t have to do much to get him there.” 

“I could’ve told you that. Did you know he used to want to build buildings?” 

He smacks Jaehyun’s ass despite his best foresight to shimmy sideways. Taeyong smells like balmy ointment.

“Has he been long?” Jaehyun asks. 

He knows that’s Johnny behind the wall of plants and zigzagged dividers, not hearing a word they say, in one of the deeper sleeps. 

“A minute or two,” Taeyong says, or euphemizes, but it’s hard to tell. 

The inside of Jaehyun’s cheek is like a steamed clam between his teeth. 

What’s eating you? he thinks Taeyong wonders. 

But even the implication, that he’s not eating it, whatever it is, that the food chain is the bad kind of backwards, it makes Jaehyun bristle somewhere deep.

He says, mouth clunky, “I don’t do that well with missing the mark.” 

“What’s new?” At Jaehyun’s look, Taeyong croons, “You never miss the mark.”

“Not that kinda mark.” 

“Yeah,” Taeyong’s got his thumb through a belt loop, the other fingers fanned out at random over the hip like in a spasm. “Not that kinda. But so what if you do. There’s gonna be another one.”

“You just said—”

Overtable Taeyong knuckles at Jaehyun’s temple, knocking to see if anybody’s home. “‘Cause you make me a liar. More self-awareness, would you.” 

“Hyung, how do I know?”

“Hm?” 

This undressed approach isn’t…

Jaehyun loads the gun and fondles it.

“How do I know if it’s really one of those right things.” He looks up, wired. “Like, how do I know without wasting too much time before I know.” 

“Let me know if you figure that out,” Taeyong’s lanky earring refracts as he wigwags along the table. “It’ll make me sleep better. And you. Here, bite.”

Kind of disappointed, Jaehyun wastes a second to chew on the rolled-up mint leaves, taking care not to shear off Taeyong’s fingertips. 

It’s that grassy taste. Some of it catches between his molars, but his tongue isn’t blade enough to lick it out. 

Jaehyun watches Taeyong on mute in his jungle thumb through ingredients, uncork, sniff something bad and recoil. His rings scratch as he handles glass.

Taeyong juts like furniture with how funnily pent-up he is, squeezed in on an atomic level. But how lovely he looks in his fuck-weird plankton environment, and how he also looks like he’s waiting for something from the corner of his eye. Has been, maybe. 

“Hyung—” Jaehyun hesitates, but Taeyong runs on patience when people least deserve it, just holding out, not planting any indirect thoughts.

Jaehyun comes to realize he’s got none of his own to air. 

“Don’t be too long, Jaehyunnie,” Taeyong says and hands him a sterile needle in a crunchy plastic wrapper.

 

 

He’s on a beach whose sand looks like pink salt. It sucks wet at his bare footsteps, tracking his weight when it refuses to stay and sink deep, having him toe off slimy kelp.

The feel really makes him miss socks. Nice, dry, padded monster foot cushions.

The sea rolls over the land in a blue-green butter knife curl, a cycle of saturate-fade. One tender poke at the soggy clouds upstairs and they’d be flooding down on him.

The air is just warm breath all over. It balloons Jaehyun’s shirt, whipping salt into his mouth the closer he gets to the coastal line, the bigger Johnny’s turned back gets. He doesn’t take the rejection personally.

Jaehyun’s been here before, just from a different perspective.

Johnny jerks his wrist, checks his watch. It stopped running at close to 1:30.

“So, Mark’s been asking,” Jaehyun begins.

“I already told him no guns.”

“He thinks it’s part of the matric.”     

“Wonder why.”

“Kinda cute, right?”

“Kid still gets mad dizzy when he falls off a five-storeyer.”

“ _He’s not a kid_ ,” Jaehyun impersonates.

“Or when one falls on him,” Johnny says. “So, naturally…”

So, naturally, gimme that firearm. Look at this competence.

They fold like lawn chair legs and dip into the sand, shadowing each other. Jaehyun is the object and Johnny its silhouette, bigger and longer and with fewer hard lines visible.

Ankles crossed, Jaehyun flexes his ass down and side to side to knead the perfect mold for sitting.

The weather rocks from wheezing to a bored-of-itself deadlock; Johnny’s hair twitches off from his forehead with it. Jaehyun sticks out his tongue to catch some of the seaweed undertone before it’s gone beyond the cliffs.

He thinks of how Taeyong never dreamshares with anyone.

A plane loses altitude overhead, a shot bird tracing the blackest smoke. Again Jaehyun’s reminded how few decibels he is compared to… that. It’s not a quiet death by any means, but from this far away, nobody would care.

And, watching it spiral, Johnny talks with this interest about the rush a collapsing dream gives him, when the world is swallowing its god, better than an orgasm.

“Sometimes,” he adds.

Sometimes. He and Mark, Jaehyun thinks, should Adrenaline Anonymous together to reconcile their respectively extreme ends of the spectrum.

“You’ll agree your right hand isn’t much of a competing force to begin with,” Jaehyun claws his fingers into the sand, letting it cling then sift through. “You should change it up before you get asymmetrical for real.”

“Nah, you would’ve told me right then. If you thought it was that bad for me, right?”

Well, Jaehyun blinks. So now there’s that.

“I thought I was…”

“You were. But you stared weird after. Did a lot of that staring, after that.”

“I,” Jaehyun lifts his chin, “thought you weren’t…”

“Oh, I was.”

They’ve got the vantage of staring from respective sides of the same corner each. Johnny’s face crumples first.

Jaehyun droops back on his hands. Johnny pays mind as his polo cleavage rides down easy like pastry wrapper, smiling that leftover ghost thing of dead people who found something funny too late.

“Eyes up here,” Jaehyun says in some dry language, but his guts are on fire.

He feels dwarfed to fifteen again. Just a gangly bland blur with an egg head and arms on a good day.

“Sorry, honey.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“Sugarplum.”

He gets lulled by the earful of conch shell. Johnny’s always been fond of the ocean, the way it talks, even after. He’s like that, this Johnny. Doesn’t let past run-ins ruin his pleasures. Many compartments in that big head.

“Sometimes,” Johnny thinks, looking… loosened. “Sometimes I’m so sore for, like, ten years ago.”

“Ten, now?” Jaehyun’s gonna find that funny even if it’s anything but.

“Ten, five. Doesn’t matter, it’s just that thing of the past.”

“Like you’re sorry?”

“Sore. Like I miss it.”

Apparently, that’s also just a sometimes, because Johnny’s quick to add so. And it’s heavy, but Jaehyun knows nostalgia himself and how it cripples overtime if it goes on as background to all things for too long.

The thing about design, this whole mess of a business… You cherry-pick, strictly, and that’s it. You inject in the details from pure inspiration or patchwork them together using disparate characteristics. From that 00’s sitcom or the wood-joisted place you get your ass-crack croissants.

You do that and get it through your skull that no matter how seductive something from the past remembers, how badly you want to relive the good or the hurt, dead means dead and you don’t dreambuild places or people from vivid memory. It’s the most slippery way to stop telling apart what is real and what isn’t, what was ever.

That regret sounds a lot like Taeil’s.

Jaehyun rarely lets himself think about that, good old Taeil and where some of those sentiments had led him. The thought of Mark going down that same path makes him feel wrong.

“Guess that’s when you know you’re getting too old for the grind,” Jaehyun says, kind of full of shit.

“Yeah,” Johnny pulls at his cheek, but it looks far away. His head’s not here.

“On the other hand, dick augmentation,” Jaehyun provides. “An uptick in the market. You reckon I personally should look into it?”

The radio silence isn’t comforting.

“You ever think about that?” Johnny asks.

It’s so sudden, like Jaehyun’s supposed to know which 2-a.m. agony in his glossary he’s picking. He’d like to—always has—but he’s not about to beg.

“Dick augmentation?”

“Just building a house,” Johnny gives. Something about his face. “Not even a picket fence, just… calm for a good while.”

“Where?”

Johnny shrugs. “Just somewhere.”

“Which world’s ‘while’ we talking?”

Johnny hums in a teachery way, as if Jaehyun’s catching up, that Johnny never doubted he would. He sponges up the weirdest old-people choices to patronize.

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I’ve noticed, you know. No problem seems to be that much of a problem when you’re under.”

Like hell.

Jaehyun can think of barrages of paradoxes that are, in fact, much of problems. Getting his skull cracked in like an ostrich egg, his knowledge trickling out. Missing the mark and waking up to consequences that there’s no waking up from, or being the specimen behind the plexiglass.

Doyoung wanting out, that kind of problem.

What’re you thinking, Johnny?

Fuck are you thinking?

Vast things are predisposed to being looked to, in a way. Jaehyun looks to the reedy water sloshing lathered champagne to his feet, and doesn’t think at all.

Jaehyun’s throat is full. He feels how it anchors low to his stomach, chaining things with he’s glad to leave untalked about. He remembers hating these sorts of dreams.  

He gets a sense of leaning. Just like being leaned into, like a touch, and that’s real on his radar only when Johnny’s fingers have taken good root in Jaehyun’s hair—gather then release. Again, and pressing from the thumb.

“You freaking out?” Johnny sounds blurry through his lisp. He crowds himself close, and Jaehyun lets him slot the cozy V of his open legs at his side.

Jaehyun lets him kiss at his jaw and stick his tacky nose to the underside, not struggling one bit.

“Jae, come on. Find your nose and your mouth.”

That giraffe-built, tank-neighboring sack of expired pricks is so pleased with himself when he pats his flyswatter of a hand against Jaehyun’s cheek, gentling it on the finish.

“What’s that?” Johnny is all ears, all actory performance grease.

“Fuck off, saying shit like that.”

Johnny pokes his dimple area which he evolves into a ticklish pull at his ear, like mimicking a little weight. He’s been trying to get Jaehyun to pierce it for years. Jaehyun watches the bob in Johnny’s throat when he speaks, its skip with his voice.   

“You said?”

“I said—”

“‘Fuck off’?”

“That’s what I said.”

Their foreheads fit strange together through the skin and domed bone and so little give. The obvious thing to do is grab Johnny’s sandy calf under the codename of centering Jaehyun’s own gravity, and fuck the fact how wobbly it all actually makes him, just fuck it.

Johnny’s forehead knocks on Jaehyun’s once, twice, and what is he, a bull?

“And what else?”

“And… your leg’s starting to feel like the back of Ten’s head. What’re you doing?”

Because water _is_ what Johnny’s doing, splashing his way to the horizonless sea as he leaves his trunks to float.

“Wanna see something Ten’s head is truly deprived of?”  

His ass, beaconing whiter than the rest of him, bounces on each jump.

 

* * *

 

“Mark’s a good kid,” Jaehyun says when Mark’s nowhere to be seen.

Disassembling his glock into its basest lego particles has a charm. The way it’s a toy in pieces but something altogether less giggly when in your face.

Jaehyun tongues around the gummy remnants of the fattest dumpling on this side of Seoul. It’s sticky-loud like something from a make-out.

“Spastic,” says a lounging Doyoung, eyes glittery watermelon seeds and the vein of his forearm ready to be plugged. “Ten keeps complaining about how he leaves shit around that’s not even his, and you know who has to hear about it?”

Johnny cheers with his pissy Corona bottle, “To Mark’s shit. Left around and all, not even his.”

“And you know who has to hear about it,” Jaehyun says, grim.

“Make sure to reheat my tea, please,” Doyoung sighs.

Jaehyun eyes the steaming pink mug of fuck knows what compost and leaves the magazine and crouches next to Doyoung’s duct-taped lawn chair. To better see his bunny face, then the cold blue of his protruding, tubey veins. The tip of Doyoung’s nose glistens.

Way back when, during the Bronze Age Taeil days when Taeil was still Taeil, Jaehyun and Johnny made a half-assed promise to each other. But half-assed was the good, the only thing that had really stuck up till then.

You ever wanna move on, the promise went like this, Johnny ever wants to move on, he shouldn’t leave Jaehyun in the dark about it. He should just tell him. But tell him first, even before Johnny is sure. Thinking about it is enough, you know.

Jaehyun did no such thing with Doyoung. Neither of them have that guilt to acknowledge it, Jaehyun sees how it is, so it comes down to feeling like they’re nurturing something rotten.

“Know what I think? I think these weed extracts of yours are funky, hyung,” says Jaehyun. “Might be the reason you’re the way you are. So there’s still hope.”

He’s so Cheshire about it that even Johnny throws him a curious look.

“Sweet dreams,” he coos, and puts Doyoung under before he loses those teeth.

 

* * *

 

“The mark engages, we’re in motion. Not sooner and not after. Have fun until then.”

“Not you, Mark,” Jaehyun says, watching him sag in relief. “The subject. You’re the architect. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“I know that. I was…”

“Hyperventilating for a second there,” Ten says and slips all of his nakedness into this liquid disco ball of pants.

They catch on the uproll over his ass. Very shimmery.

Out of nowhere, Taeyong stops playing with Mark’s hand. Jaehyun’s seen people realize things that way before. Tender things.

“Defibrillator, anyone?” Johnny asks. Doyoung salutes with two fingers. “Keep it that way. Just in case, you know, what if the Mark here forgets to pump blood the necessary places.”

“I wouldn’t say pumping is his problem,” Doyoung Jaws into his Thailand-sized sandwich.

Taeyong smacks his palms. “Alright, heads out of your asses, everyone.”

He wants a guinea pig, he says, for the test-run of a baby-fresh heavy-duty and potentially lethal non-intravenous sedative.

Like, quarter-lethal, tops. And the blindness should wear off almost instantly.

“Kidding. Ten, get over here.”

 

* * *

 

_i._

“You said no real people.”

Jaehyun zip-lines Mark’s line of sight. “She’s not real.”

“She’s a dead ringer for my cousin, dude. That’s drawing from the real world, that’s doing what you said not to do.”

Mark thinks he’s a weak spot because he’s brought her here. Maybe even that he ought to be gouged out of the plan like a hissy cigarette burn. If that’s what he’s indeed thinking, what an idiot back-stabber of a brain he’s got, can’t be relied on for shit, then good raising style on Jaehyun’s part.

“Calm down.”

“Hyung.”

That one’s new, sidetracks him with how many sizes it makes Mark lose. He’s not looking when Jaehyun presses a hand low to his back.

“It’s your subconscious. Remember what we talked about. Short movies. Now you direct.”

“She’s comin’, she’s comin’—”

“Make conversation.”

“Noona,” Mark half-asks.

Tonight, noona is girlish and pale and pretty, with a smile that cuts no creases. Jaehyun’s senior, but you wouldn’t guess. A nugget-sized earring pendulums when she tucks one side of her hair.

What’s Markkeuri doing here? She—cheek kiss—is very surprised—hair ruffle—to have found—hair smoothing—him here, of all places.

Yeah, no, he didn’t expect her here, either! This is not noona’s usual scene.

Mark explains how he’s trying the part-time job thing.

Jaehyun’s courteously unplugged himself spine-first to the thick bar edge, as distinguished eavesdroppers do. Something hours old, it feels like, sticks to his shirt but won’t show because it’s made of frictionless black that already ripples like it can be bottled.

He rolls himself an inch away with his shoulder blades, monitoring Mark’s sweat.

As soon as noona has cheek-pinched to her heart’s content, she’s antsy to sail to her own business she has here. A friend.

“You should give him a number,” Jaehyun calls, turning their synced heads. “To catch you later.”

Mark laughs nervously.

She clicks her tongue because how come little Mark doesn’t have her cell again, but of course he doesn’t. That’s very Mark. 

Mark laughs more nervously.

 

 

 _ii_.

Per Mark’s intended design, it’s foggy and throbbing, but just short of livable.

They all unloaded their bladders before falling asleep.

The perimeter is a rectangle, in the shorter wall of which the entrance is carved. People toy-train on the other side to wait out the molasses of a queue and permission to get fucked up beyond the cute red tape to Narnia. The ending clip of that tape glints in Taeyong’s hand. The lasers lighthouse perfectly in Taeyong’s black hair.

Jaehyun’s got Mark’s wrist and waist and everything else attached as he front-crawls them through the sour sweat and dumb-beat lightshow. The heel of his last step slides on buttery vomit. They almost keel over.

“Hold onto him for me,” Jaehyun says at a volume Taeyong can’t possibly hear, but he knows what to do.

“Johnny’s in,” he mouths.

Jaehyun’s way through the fridge-blue neon maze is his eye out in the crowd, on Lee Sunmi’s back.

There she is. Short time, a couple sees.

She shimmers and kneads past projections like through minced meat, as she should, because they’re all bits of her, and Jaehyun tugs along as if on a leash.

He slides open the door to the toilets.

The jolt in temperature against the worked-up film over Jaehyun’s skin is a slam dunk into cold beer.

Sunmi is at the circle mirror good for little else than vague color blots, dabbing red at her lip.

“The chaperone, right?”

“I’m not here for a scoop,” Jaehyun’s smile is undercooked.

Their last meeting under effectively vaccinated her, he can tell. It’s the thing that happens after bone break or when the skin has bled, the same thing of when the body fears so it layers thicker crust in those places, to the point of too much.

Maybe she’s been waking up sweaty.

Sunmi’s dream security must’ve barbed up, too.

There’s been times of having to clean up his messes, cases fucked halfway through that he had to revisit. Each time, the subject’s defenses branched out. Tricky electric fences or the occasional freight train bulleting through an office elevated ten floors up in human vertigo.

Tonight, it’s Kim Hyuna.

He’s done it a million times.

They go half and half, Jaehyun and Johnny.

Johnny is the mouse for the cat. He can’t off the core line of opposing defense, the most vital part, without rerouting the flash flood of projections their way, for some disinfection. Just keep it neat, no cockery.

Must be why Johnny’s making out with Sunmi’s mind police between the plastic palm tree and the trash can.

Sunmi seems she’s got no soft parts left. She purples in the popsicle light. She mirror-watches, stuck in the way ugly things are fascinating.

Hyuna’s dress fits like she rolled around in a puddle of stick-on mercury, and the membrane of it stretches over Johnny’s working hand.

Sunmi’s loath to leave because this shithole packs the real riches. All Jaehyun has to do is ballerina past her without an upset to her hair trigger hunch. Death by rabid mob isn’t his priority.

The floor is wonky rubber, smeared and coming loose close to the walls; the paint job is balding, and someone took a piss too soon just over there. Pleased with the full character, Jaehyun counts those stalls, hitching at around thirty as they keep going.

Keep, keep going.

The row of them tapeworms around the corner this building doesn’t have, like an upside-down spoon image. Each door is numbered in black, gone over as if with blotting paper the farther it is.

Back at the base, this was just a scaffold in the blueprint.

Just empty space with pissed-on flooring but with enough skeleton to let Sunmi’s mind furnish in the rest. People can’t resist that urge, to make things fuller. More real.

Only thing you gotta do right is the drawing, and leave spaces big enough for the passenger.

The real riches.

You’d never look for a safe at a rave party restroom.

You’d never think to entrust anything of more integrity than a grocery list to a graffiti’d quickie spot.

Here, you wouldn’t think to employ extra vigilance of the non-STD kind.

Jaehyun works with the want he sees and the want of his own, sidling to Hyuna’s back. She aligns, and when he doesn’t get his balls kicked in, he pleats a curly swash of hair aside. It shows the necklace of Johnny’s fingers under her jaw.

Jaehyun’s first kiss catches Johnny’s knuckles.

She grew just tall enough for Jaehyun’s chin and just shy of Johnny’s throat. Hyuna wheels to face Jaehyun.

“Not here for a scoop, huh?” she asks, picking him apart.

“Not my job tonight.”

This place echoes like a cave.

By the spread of her palm he pulls her into his retraced steps, next to Sunmi, until she’s purple, too.

You couldn’t light a smoke from someone shit at cues. That’s a melted-through eyelid at best.

But Johnny catches on and perfects the synapse, meets Jaehyun halfway, and it’s no work at all. He lets Jaehyun lick right into his mouth that’s sloppy with the beforeness of Hyuna, and Jaehyun surprises himself with how much he wants this one temporary thing.

They jostle chest to chest, and Johnny bites like a stapler. They flinch apart.

“I’m not a fucking canape,” Jaehyun tongues the sting off on an incisor. Makes it more unpleasant out of spite.

That’s meaningless to keep up, faced with Johnny’s asthma laugh puffs. He’s cheesing so bad he dimples, and Jaehyun takes a moment, just takes one, because.

A body like Johnny’s shouldn’t melt this easy. He shapeshifts into a moment’s tool, Jaehyun’s seen it to stupidity from the sidelines, but this goes smug to his head.

Behind Johnny’s ear smells of wet earth and vanilla. He palms for Johnny’s zipper, pressing in. His nail snags on the whatever button, a sharp metallic sound.

Johnny’s head slouches to his throat. Craning from all that foggy breath of Johnny’s lax bites that start with teeth and weaken into just rolling lip, Jaehyun is ungiving and morbidly curious in it until Johnny objects because there’s shit he deserves, but not this.

Jaehyun asks if he’s sure about that.

Jaehyun feels big hands on his ass, kneading it apart to a full kind of strain.

Taut a fit as Johnny’s balls are, Jaehyun spans his fingers against the elastic counterpressure, letting Johnny tip into the touch.

No slick to get him through yet, and Jaehyun doesn’t envy the sore feel. Instead he coaxes it sorer, grinning all the while Johnny’s dick fills out twitch by twitch. Just like that. Like it’s the best thing in the world.

It feels like there’s a hot pack over his knuckles, microwaving sweat out.

Jaehyun gives it a flamingo stretch, neck pink as one, and finds Sunmi and Hyuna’s thighs perfectly slotted, clutching each other closer.

Irrespective of any displeasure, Jaehyun pushes Johnny backwards. Pushes again, snowblowing their mass in a unit, and counts the ugly passing stalls. He knows which one’ll go kaching.

Number nineteen opens like something dried in its hinges. Inside it’s all bleached wood and roomier than a decent kitchen.

In the left corner is a black safe shaped like a soap, and when Jaehyun kneels, Johnny quizzes him on the combination number.

Of course Jaehyun remembers. A row of six of them, on a dick-doodled fold of paper.

 

 

_i._

Jaehyun thanks Hyunsuk the barista, whose ears are a jewelry box each, for the marker and napkin. He hands over both and hangs over Mark’s shoulder, inoffensive as plain pasta.

The music capsizes into a deeper bass, and Mark’s cousin takes her leave with one last see you around and be good, Mark, and call me. Don’t lose it again.

Limp-wristed, Mark keeps waving until they can’t tell her back from others’, then skims the napkin.

Arm overhanging Mark’s chest, Jaehyun pats the bone there.

“What?”

“It’s too short.” Mark’s frowning at the capillaried one-nine in thick black ink.

Just as he reaches inside his pocket for his totem, Jaehyun’s forearm pistons up into his windpipe.

**Author's Note:**

> [why hate yourself when you can hydrate yourself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxg4C365LbQwhy)


End file.
